Ingredients for a Best-Selling Home Community

The secret ingredient for a best-selling project in a listless market is to add a little, and sometimes a lot, of something extra and unexpected.

It takes more than a good location, a good price, and a good product to create a best-selling community these days. The process of getting a project to sell well at a time when buyers are constantly being told that buying a new house is a bad idea requires including something extra, the 13th bagel in a baker’s dozen, the second cherry topping a sundae, something that makes a buyer feel special, lucky, happy, smart.

That’s the lesson to be learned from some of the best-selling communities around. For all of them, success has come from delivering more than the ordinary and standard, whether it’s lower utility bills or a bowling alley in the basement.

Chris Mayer

Aerie Lofts Three-story homes with the look of urban high-rise lofts sell in the suburbs.

ColRich’s three-story models made COO Graeme Gabriel nervous at first. It wasn’t SolTerra’s expansive canyon or peekaboo ocean views from that height that made him queasy, but rather the worry that nobody would want to buy them. “People thought that in
San Diego there is no way that anyone would have a three-story plan,” recalls Gabriel.
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Courtesy Meritage Group

Green in the DesertPhoenix buyers snap up houses with tiny utility bills, thanks to high-tech solar.

Meritage Homes should not be selling houses this fast in this location. “Southwest [
Phoenix] has been kind of the worst of the worst” housing market, says C.R. Herro, Meritage’s vice president for environmental affairs. Yet the Scottsdale, Ariz.–based company sold 14 homes in 2011’s first quarter at its Cortile at Palm Valley community in Goodyear.
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Spire, one of the fastest-selling condominium projects in the U.S. last year, almost didn’t happen. “It’s remarkable I’m talking to you now,” says Chris Crosby, executive vice president for Nichols Partnership, the project’s developer.
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Courtesy of Belgravia Group565 Quincy may be the only condominium in town with a bowling alley in the basement.

“[The sales success] was really price-point driven,” says Kaufman. “Once we [lowered the prices], they just flew off the shelf. The people came …. We had the right location, the right amenities, the right layout.”
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